Holocaust and World War II movies

IN DARKNESS tells the true story of Leopold Soha who risks his own life to save a dozen people from certain death. Initially only interested in his own good, the thief and burglar hides Jewish refugees for 14 months in the sewers of the Nazi-occupied town of Lvov (former Poland). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1417075/

The espionage thriller begins in 1997, as shocking news reaches retired Mossadsecret agents about their former colleague. All three have been venerated for decades by their country because of the mission that they undertook back in 1966, when the trio tracked down Nazi war criminal Vogel in East Berlin. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1226753/

A film about an unfinished film which portrays the people behind and before the camera in the Warsaw Ghetto, exposing the extent of the cinematic manipulation forever changing the way we look at historic images.

It is 1942, the war is in full swing and France is occupied by the Nazis. To Robert Klein, however, these events are of little concern. As an art dealer, he makes a nice profit off the situation of the Jews, who are selling their possessions in a hurry to leave the country. He holds no political affinities and chooses to remain indifferent. All this changes when one day, a Jewish newspaper is accidentally delivered to his address, and Klein discovers there is another Robert Klein residing in Paris, a Jew sought by the police. When the other Klein cannot be found, authorities grow suspicious and the art dealer is forced to offer proof of his French heritage. Before long he is entangled in a quest to track down his elusive namesake and find out what happened. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Klein

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is considered the best of the series of novels that Bassani produced about the lives of Italian Jews in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. Although the novel focuses on the relationships between the major characters, the shadow of creeping fascism, especially the racial laws that restricted Jews’ participation in Italian society, looms over all the novel’s events. According to Bassani one hundred and eighty-three Jews living in Ferrara were deported to German death camps, predominantly under the puppet Salo Republic in 1943.

Mrs. Jacoby is sailing to Japan with her daughter and foreign service officer son-in-law who is being posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. She still considers the country the enemy responsible for the death of her son during World War II, but her feelings change when she meets Mr. Asano on board the ship. When she advises her family of Mr. Asano’s desire to court her, Mrs. Jacoby’s daughter objects to the possibility of an interracial marriage.

Anna, a German woman who tells the story of her parents before, during and after World War II. Her mother, Lene, meets her father, Hans, and they fall in love and marry. As the war breaks out, Hans is conscripted into the army and Lene suffers through air raids in Berlin.

Two young married women in the 1950s don’t recognise how unfulfilled they have been in their marriages until they meet each other. In the preliminary scenes, set in 1942, Lena (Isabelle Huppert), a pretty 18 year old, has been arrested and brought to an internment camp for Jews in the Pyrenees. The camp is guarded by members of the French Foreign Legion, and one of them, Michel (Guy Marchand), writes her a note warning her she may be deported to a Nazi camp, and offers her marriage as a means of escape. She accepts. During the marriage ceremony she discovers that he too is Jewish. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entre_Nous

1943: Holland is under total Nazi occupation. In Amsterdam, Jack, an unassuming accountant, first meets Ina at a birthday party – a 20-year-old beauty from a wealthy diamond manufacturing family who instantly steals his heart. http://www.stealapencil.com/synopsis.php

Budapest in the thirties. The restaurant owner Laszlo hires the pianist András to play in his restaurant. Both men fall in love with the beautiful waitress Ilona who inspires András to his only composition. His song of Gloomy Sunday is, at first, loved and then feared, for its melancholic melody triggers off a chain of suicides. The fragile balance of the erotic ménage à trois is sent off kilter when the German Hans goes and falls in love with Ilona as well.

A young Jewish American man endeavors to find the woman who saved his grandfather during World War II in a Ukrainian village, that was ultimately razed by the Nazis, with the help of an eccentric local.

When Hannah Stern, a 13 year-old girl neglectful to her Jewish heritage and “tired of remembering,” goes to open the door to the prophet Elijha during the Seder she finds herself in 1940s Poland. After being sent to a Nazi concentration camp she must use her knowledge of the future to survive the past and learn something about the importance of remembering. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0179148/

The village Schabbach, on the Hunsrueck in Germany through the years 1919-1982. Central person is Maria, who we see growing from a 17 year old girl to an old woman, and her family. The family, like the rest of the German people live through the crises after WW-I, the rise and fall of Nazism and WW-II, and the rebuilding and the following prosperity of the village after WW II. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087400/

Ashes and Diamonds – Maciek, a young Resistance fighter, is ordered to kill Szczuka, a Communist district leader, on the last day of World War II. Though killing has been easy for him in the past, Szczuka was a fellow soldier, and Maciek must decide whether to follow his orders. http://www.criterion.com/films/342-ashes-and-diamonds

A compelling drama/documentary chronicling the life and death of Il Duce himself, from his days as a terrorist to his alliance with Hitler to the betrayal of his son-in-law and untimely demise.

The story of a close-knit group of young kids in Nazi Germany who listen to banned swing music from the US. Soon dancing and fun leads to more difficult choices as the Nazis begin tightening the grip on Germany. Each member of the group is forced to face some tough choices about right, wrong, and survival.

The film deals with the events of the Affiche Rouge (“red poster”) affair. The title was taken from the caption on a propaganda poster, in which the Nazis sought to present prominent resistance fighters as foreign criminals. The caption read “Liberators? Liberation by the army of crime”

A banker joins the Nazi Party to advance his middling career. But when the Jews in his community are rounded up and taken away, he realizes his terrible mistake and renounces politics altogether–a decision which lands him in a labor camp. http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809783477/info

Comedian Harmonists tells the story of a famous, German male sextet, five vocals and piano, the “Comedian Harmonists”, from the day they meet first in 1927 to the day in 1934, when they become banned by the upcoming Nazis, because three of them are Jewish.

Levi is a Jewish man living alone in a small village in Germany in the mid-1930’s. He does a good business buying and selling, he courts the farmer’s daughter, and he chats with his pet rabbit during his long road trips. But then there’s a cave-in at a nearby railroad tunnel, and this brings the railroad engineer and workers and bureaucrats from Nazi Berlin. Suddenly things get difficult, and not just for Levi. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0198006/

Lord Darlington used his influence to broker the policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. He irritated Congressman Lewis, one of the dignitaries at a conference, who argued in favour of the foreign policy being conducted by “professionals” rather than by “gentlemen amateurs”. After reading the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Lord Darlington commanded that two German-Jewish maids should be dismissed, considering their employment inappropriate. Stevens carried out the order but Miss Kenton almost resigned in protest, fearing that the girls would have to return to Germany; her own need for employment caused her to avoid following through. Darlington later regretted his decision and asked Stevens to reinstate the maids, but they could not be located.

Berlin in 1945 after Germany’s defeat in the war. The former military surgeon Dr. Hans Mertens (Ernst Wilhelm Borchert) returns home from the battlefield to find his home destroyed. He suffers from the terrible memories of the war and becomes an alcoholic. A photographer and Nazi concentration camp survivor, finds him living in her apartment as she returns home and they soon become friends and roommates.

The story’s focus is on the four privates who survive the war from beginning to end with their sergeant, becoming known as “The Sergeant’s Four Horsemen” as early as Sicily. The body of the movie consists of a series of episodes highlighting the insanity and grotesqueness of war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Red_One

Swedish national Raoul Wallenberg, newcomer to politics and international machinations, travels to German-occupied Budapest during WWII in order to effectively intervene in the fate of trapped Hungarian Jews, by providing them with safe passage to Sweden. Based on a true story. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099673/plotsummary

THREE stories weave together about the haunts of Holocaust past, a composer, an actor, and a journalist.

Set during the German occupation of Paris during the Second World War, it tells the story of Lucas Steiner, a Jewish theatre director and his Gentile wife, Marion Steiner, who struggles to keep him concealed from the Nazis in their theatre cellar while she performs his former job both as an actress and directing the company.

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers’ arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.